Too Much Pressure for Dance Mom’s

My obsession with Dance Mom’s, a reality show on the Life network, can be fully blamed on my sister. I heard about the show before but was never really that interested in finding the channel and watching it. Then one day my older sister said that if I like Toddlers and Tiaras then I would LOVE Dance Mom’s because they both have crazy moms but in Dance Mom’s the children actually have talent. So on Tuesday about a month ago I turned on the TV and was instantly hooked. Even though I like watching the show I don’t agree with some of the things they do.

For instance, the teachers on TV put way too much pressure on their students. The teachers all want their students to be the best but when they have an off day and don’t perform as well they basically yell at them and tell them how horrible it was. They create a list from the best performance to the worst and the person at the bottom usually doesn’t get a solo for the next show. As a runner for track and cross country I know how it feels to do badly in a race. You already feel terrible, you don’t need to make a list and show it to everybody else to see how bad you did. I think this list is supposed to motivate the kids to do better but I feel like it is actually doing the opposite. If a dancer puts in all their effort in a performance but is constantly at the bottom of the list, would they be motivate or just want to give up? A better list would highlight not just weaknesses but also strengths in a performance.

The parents also put too much pressure on their child to strive to be the best dancer at the studio. For example one mother on “Dance Mom’s: Miami” makes her eight year old daughter get up at 4 a.m. (THAT IS 4 A.M. IN THE MORNING) to do her homework. She is eight years old. When does she have time to be a child if she is always dancing and doesn’t even have time to do her homework? By doing this I feel like the child will be burned out by the age of 15 when she can actually get a professional career out of it. It’s great that they love to dance, but they need to make time for themselves and be a kid also. There are only so many years that a kid can be a kid.

As a result of all this pressure these parents deal with they start to take it out on each other. The fights the moms have are probably escalated to make the show more dramatic but they seem to act worse than their kids. One of the most common fits they have is “how so and so child has more time with the teacher and gets all the attention”. Usually the arguments end in an all-out screaming match and one mom storms out of the room saying “I am done with this, I don’t want my daughter to be around you guys anymore”. They always come back though. The way these parents act makes me feel embarrassed for their child, but the show wouldn’t be as interesting if the parents were normal.

Even though, I don’t approve of the things they do on the show, I won’t stop watching it because I love the drama. Sometimes after watching an episode I wonder with all the pressure the teachers and parents put on the children to be perfect, is the child living out their dreams or are the parents living out their dreams through the child.